The sick man of Africa

I dread attending meetings on Congo. At almost every one a Congolese will stand up and start to rail, then scream and weep. Some get very aggressive. The police were called to one meeting. For a while I was embarrassed and irritated. Now I think it is absolutely understandable, appropriate even.

The Democratic Republic of Congo, the vast heart of Africa, endowed with some of the richest ores and most fertile land on the planet, lies broken and ungoverned. Congo has the lowest GDP per capita in the world and lies at the very bottom of the UN’s Human Development Index.

The rest of Africa is now doing better. More and more Africans have a better life than they did ten or 20 years ago. The wars are diminishing in number and ferocity; trade and investment, led by China, have revived its economies so that 11 of the world’s fastest growing economies are African. If the numbers are to be believed — and many have been revised drastically upwards recently — there are also improvements in health, education and general well-being.

But not in Congo, which is still stuck where most of Africa was a decade ago. It never was a real nation state, originally carved out as a personal estate at the end of the 19th century by King Leopold of Belgium, its first owner-ruler. For the first half of the 20th century it was ruled by the Belgian state, then for most of the second half by Mobutu Sese Seko, who treated it much as King Leopold had done. In the village where he was born he built five grotesquely grand palaces and an airport with a runway to accommodate Concorde so that he could take his family shopping in Paris or New York. Unsurprisingly he was a staunch anti-communist, which ensured he stayed in power until the Cold War ended.

The government in Kinshasa today is unpopular, corrupt and rapacious, incapable of establishing effective institutions, providing security or delivering basic services like health and education. For the past 16 years its eastern provinces, North and South Kivu, have been terrorised by hundreds of militias and gangs, creating a zone of lethal anarchy in which more than five million people are said to have died. That figure may be exaggerated but the gangs still kill and rape at will, despite a 19,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force costing $1.4 billion a year. It is a forgotten army. Eastern Congo is the biggest conflict of the 21st century so far but it has been largely ignored.

On 20 November the largest town in the region, Goma, was invaded by a rebel army known as M23. The Congolese army ran away and the UN force supposed to be protecting the town and its citizens stepped aside and let them pass. The rebels then threatened to march on the other strategic town in the region, Bukavu, but last weekend they were persuaded to withdraw from Goma. M23 — the Mouvement 23 Mai, named after the date of the last failed peace agreement — is not just another band of malcontents or a brigand gang. It is made up of fighters from a previous rebellion integrated into the Congolese army as part of an earlier peace agreement. That fell apart in April this year when the integrated troops were ordered to move to another part of the country. The M23 are well-trained and smartly dressed, but they are not interested in taking territory or making peace. They push their political demands by threatening havoc if they are ignored. Already there are reports of looting, rape and casual murder in Goma; 650,000 people are reported to be displaced.

Some call this the second genocide in the region, the first being the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. And this war is not over yet. We in Britain are involved. These fighters are armed and supported by Congo’s neighbours, Rwanda and Uganda, UK allies in the region and recipients of some £140 million of UK aid last year. Recent revelations from Congo have created a dilemma for the donors. Rwanda spends aid money particularly well, ensuring it builds schools, roads and health clinics and does reach the people. But a recent UN report detailed Rwandan supplies of arms, ammunition, uniforms and communications equipment to M23. This week new evidence from the the UN emerged showing that some 1000 Rwandan troops helped the M23 seize Goma.

Guilt-ridden by the West’s failure to respond to the 1994 genocide, several British aid ministers have been close to the persuasive Rwandan ruler, Paul Kagame. On a plane journey with Clare Short in 2002 when she was international development secretary, I tried to argue that Kagame had questions to answer. The red haze descended and she threatened to have me thrown off the plane. Andrew Mitchell, the recently departed secretary of state and a Kagame fan, led Conservative party annual summer camps to Rwanda to take part in development. He established a close personal friendship with Kagame. His last act as international development secretary was to restore the £16 million he had recently suspended because of Rwanda’s role in eastern Congo. His successor, Justine Greening, has suspended it again.

The politics of East Africa’s Rift Valley are as complex, fractured and violent as the tectonic plates that rend the landscape and throw up volcanic eruptions. The latest conflict is not primarily a war over resources. Areas rich in gold, diamonds and coltan have not been particular targets. The M23 rebels’ seizure of Goma is yet another aftershock of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, which itself was part of a conflict that goes back centuries. History matters here. It is a vast Götterdämmerung saga.

The two former kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi are a unique phenomenon. Two races, Hutu and Tutsi, became part of the same ethnic group from the 17th century. They live in the same space and society, speak the same language, worship the same gods, obey the same chiefs. The Hutu, a Bantu people, were farmers who moved into the area from about the 8th century. The Tutsi, a tall cattle-keeping people probably from the Horn of Africa, came later and settled in the same areas. They integrated their societies but maintained separate roles in complex but balanced power structures. But they did not, for the most part, intermarry.

These two peculiar kingdoms covered today’s Rwanda and Burundi as well as parts of southern Uganda and Kivu in eastern Congo. German and then Belgian imperialists decided that the tall, long-headed Tutsi were superior and gave them education and positions of power, making them the ruling class and destroying the delicately balanced status quo. But the Tutsis were a minority and independence in 1962 brought majority rule, which turned into a pogrom and drove them into exile. In Burundi the Tutsis retained power but Rwanda became a Hutu-ruled state, driving thousands of Tutsis into exile.

The children of those Tutsi refugees grew up in neighbouring Uganda and joined Yoweri Museveni’s rebellion, helping to put him in power in 1986. Four years later they took their weapons and invaded their own country. The war stalemated and in 1994 Hutu fanatics began a planned genocide. Some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus who refused to join in the genocide were murdered. But the invading Tutsi army, commanded by Paul Kagame, won the war and drove the Rwandan army westwards into eastern Congo. More than a million or more terrified Hutus, fearful of retribution, went with them.

The 1994 genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, Congo’s tiny neighbour to the east, 89 times smaller than Congo, has also led to Congo’s current war. Two years later Kagame’s troops crossed the border, attacked the former Rwandan army and forced civilian refugees to return to Rwanda. Although almost 100,000 were locked up and investigated, the rest were resettled in Rwanda and given stern political re-education. Meanwhile Rwandan and Ugandan troops, and large numbers of Tutsis from eastern Congo, began to chase the remnant Rwandan army across Congo, killing them wherever they found them.

Mobutu, sick with cancer, was incapable of defending the country. He had played divide and rule, keeping the ruling class at odds with each other and making sure the country itself was divided, not linked by roads. This legacy, and its sheer size, make Congo almost ungovernable to this day. The distance between the capital Kinshasa and Goma is greater than the distance between London and Moscow. No road links them. But when the Rwandan army had cleared the camps in eastern Congo in 1996 they kept walking west. Twelve months and more than 1,000 miles later, they and their Ugandan allies and a host of disgruntled Congolese marched into the capital, Kinshasa, and installed an exiled opponent of Mobutu, Laurent Kabila, as president.

That looked like an end but Kabila began to turn against his backers and cut the strings. In 1998, the Rwandans invaded again to try to remove him. He called on his neighbours and seven African states sent their armies to protect him. Outgunned, the Rwandan and Ugandan armies were forced to retreat and then fell out with each other. They still got their man, however. Kabila was murdered by his boy-soldier bodyguards in 2001, almost certainly on Rwanda’s orders. He was replaced by his son, Joseph Kabila, a more
pliable character.

Back in the east, the Rwandans and Ugandans continued to worry that armed opposition movements were massing in the forests and mountains of Kivu, preparing to invade. They also want the extraordinary agricultural and mineral wealth of the Kivus to flow eastwards through their countries to the international markets. Many of their senior military men and politicians have become multi-millionaires through that trade. That part of eastern Congo was once part of the Rwandan Kingdom and some Rwandans claim it as their territory.

Meanwhile, to protect the trade and the security of Rwanda, its defence forces helped fellow Tutsis in eastern Congo form a militia with training, weapons and communications. This today is the M23 movement. But the trouble with puppets is that they don’t always jerk when you pull the strings. The eastern Congo Tutsis have their own agenda and Rwanda does not call all its shots. It even handed over one former leader, Laurent Nkunda, to the International Criminal Court. Their way of getting a share of power is to cause havoc if the government does not give them money and positions in the army. Now they have left Goma it is not clear whether they will once again be reintegrated as soldiers in the Congolese army or remain a separate disruptive force, protecting their own people and Rwandan interests in the region.

The outlook for Congo is not good. The failure to protect Goma has weakened President Kabila, a pleasant man who gives the impression that he enjoys the trappings of office without much thought for the future of Congo. His most effective adviser, Augustin Katumba Mwanke, was killed in a plane crash in February this year. Kabila is certainly no match for the aggressive Rwandans and Ugandans when it comes to diplomacy or military force. But if he is seen to make concessions to them he will become even more unpopular and may even be overthrown.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Spectator magazine, dated 8 December 2012

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Ombeni

Before writing, I think it is better to do research. There is no part of Eastern Congo which has ever been under Rwandan Kingdom. Also, Rwanda have never handed over Laurent Nkunda to the International Criminal Court. He is in Kigali, and He is even among the commander of M23 fang.

Ian

Who gives a shit about the Congo!

http://www.facebook.com/michele.keighley Michele Keighley

‘We in Britain are involved.’ well I suppose we should be grateful you didn’t say ‘We in Britain are to blame’

Jabez Foodbotham

Indeed, although Dowden tells us that we have ministers who are ‘guilt-ridden’ by events there, so Team GB still has some runners in the conspicuous compassion stakes.

Toxteth O’Grady

Last year in London, a bunch of African chaps were protesting about Kabila’s reelection in saying he’s a rapist and a murderer and all sorts and how he should be kicked out (presumably for their preferred rapist/murderer to take his place).

I was getting fairly sick of it TBH; they were always kicking up outside the office whilst on their way through Regent St to the Embassy and they pelted some carol singers collecting for Macmillan with bottles when they thought it was ruining their protest.

One day I made two posters saying ‘Kabila is a legend’ and ‘We love Kabila’ and put them in the window as they went past. The protest ground to a halt and wigged out surrounded the building, chanting, screaming, blowing whistles etc. About 500 of them.

The police came in saying I was racially motivated and one of them (black) was shouting ‘I’m coming back later, I swear I’ll nick him!’, everything. In the end they left, confiscating the posters first ‘as evidence’ but no fine or warning “at this point”.*

Personally, I find it hilarious, especially the idea that they can have a 500 person protest with brick throwing and civil disorder of all kinds and it’s fine but I can’t put two hand written posters in the window without it being a criminal matter.

If that’s the way they behave, it’s no wonder Kabila comes down a bit heavy handed some times.

*ie ever

Austin Barry

Well, brave up to a point.

Try sticking up a poster declaring a particular bearded deity to be a paedophile.

I give you about an hour.

Daniel Maris

Sometimes I think: one of these days I am going to raise some funds for billboards quoting from the Koran. How can that be a hate crime – letting everyone hear the wonderfully peaceful message of Islam?

Daniel Maris

Well you seem a fairly assertive individual. Perhaps you should have pursued a complaint against the Police. Why can’t you put up such a poster?

I think the right to protest is important but as far as I am concerned the right applies solely to UK citizens in this country. I would be interested to know how many of the 500 were actually UK citizens.

http://www.facebook.com/toxteth.ogrady.54 Toxteth O’Grady

I shouldn’t imagine many of them. It was the middle of the day and they didn’t look as if they were out in their lunch hour.

It was the police that bothered me most. Shouting, swearing threatening to arrest me if I didn’t have ID, saying I was an idiot (which is true to a point but they couldn’t have known), a racist, that Kabila was a child murderer and ‘worse than Hitler.’ That’s the police all over nowadays though.

Here’s a pic of the mob:

Duncan

Toxleth O’Grady who stuck 604 marshmallows up one nostril?

I thought you were American.

Wilhelm

White Liberals think in their naivety that blacks and whites are the same !!

So how come white Europeans and Americans built a civilisation and put a man on the Moon while Africans couldn’t build a bicycle ?

Daniel Maris

How come did King Leopold – white and right and civilised as you would have it – preside over a regime that caused the deaths of millions of Congolese.

“Estimates of the death toll range from two million to fifteen million” Wikipedia.

Even if you wish to dispute the estimate you cannot deny that the labour regime brought in by Leopold involved the hacking off of limbs to encourage hard work.

Is that what you call “civilisation” Wilhelm? Hacking off people legs and arms in the name of rapacious European profit?

Incidentally, what do you mean by “Africans”? Do you mean Negro people or Semitic people? Because, clearly, in many ways African people were the bringers of civilisation to Europe via Egypt. I don’t think even your mate Himmler tried to claim the Egyptians were Aryans (too many paintings and mummies for that nonsense).

It’s true the Africans didn’t invent the bicycle. But neither did Europeans until around 1850. Prior to that they had enjoyed many tens of thousands of years up until the advent of Christianity living in mud huts and producing diddly squat in terms of important cultural artefacts. In fact, correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think the Germanic peoples even got as far as erecting stone buildings like Great Zimbabwe until about 500AD.

MC2

Indeed. But Great Zimbabwe didn’t get bult until the 1th century, 600 years behind the Germans

thelonghaul

>>Congo has the lowest GDP per capita in the world<<

Doesn't seem to hamper their ability to arm every group with $200 Kalashnikovs.

Bill Leslie

Good summary generally – although factually-speaking Nkunda was never passed over to the ICC but rather detained by the RPF as a kind of threat-in-the-wings based in Gisenyi/Kigali. More recent information suggests he acts in an advisory role to a number of his former lieutenants now in M23.

http://twitter.com/Rutsinzi Claude

Richard Dowden has an agenda of his own. He has had it for years now Since 1990. His anti-tutsi stands go far back to God only knows.

http://twitter.com/Rutsinzi Claude

Richard why do you really have to lie about Rwanda? One point I want to take you up on is you claim that Rwanda spends aid only partially well. You are absolutely wrong; Rwanda spends all aid it receives very well not partially but aid is entirely spent well. Even the UK international development select committee which is so critical of Rwanda on some other issues that I agree with them on by the way, confirms on regular basis that Rwanda uses well in fact very well, all of the aid it receives. You don’t need to lie to highlight you hate of Rwanda and in particular your hate of Tutsi.

anonymous

Minor point: The statement “The distance between the capital Kinshasa and Goma is greater than the distance between London and Moscow” is simply false. London to Moscow is about 2500km while Goma to Kishasa is only 1500km.

http://twitter.com/rlpkamath Rahul Kamath

It’s not a minor point at all. If this writer who claims to be an expert can be so inaccurate about basic data, how can we trust anything else he says. Sounds like we have a hack on our hands.